As an emergency physician, I have personally administered naloxone and seen patients who would otherwise die from an opioid overdose be revived within seconds. Those who say that saving someone’s life with naloxone will only foster addiction are being unscientific, inhumane and ill informed. We would never refuse an EpiPen to someone experiencing a peanut allergy for fear that it would encourage him to eat peanut butter. In Baltimore, we believe that naloxone should be part of everyone’s medicine cabinet and everyone’s first aid kit. That is why I issued a standing order that has made this medication available to all of the 620,000 residents in our city. We must make policy decisions based on science, not stigma. Addiction is a disease. We must treat it with the same urgency, humanity and compassion as we treat all diseases.

LEANA S. WEN

Baltimore

The writer is the Baltimore city health commissioner.

To the Editor: You say naloxone “carries no health risk; it cannot be abused and, if given mistakenly to someone who has not overdosed on opioids, does no harm.” In fact, like most drugs, naloxone can have adverse effects, most of which are mild, but some, such as severe hypertension, decreased platelet function, coma and death, are very significant. Severe hypertension and tachycardia can likely be exacerbated in patients who have taken amphetamines or cocaine in addition to opioids, causing heart attack or stroke. Fortunately, most overdoses treated with naloxone occur in young patients who tolerate side effects. However, I am concerned about propagating the myth that this drug is completely safe and thereby inadvertently adding a new game to the highs of addiction — get high, push the experience to near death, make sure naloxone is handy for reversal, and repeat. We may indeed see more complications if patients are using multiple rounds of opioids and naloxone.

CHARLOTTE BELL

Milford, Conn.

The writer is an anesthesiologist.

To the Editor: Some of those you interview make the case that people use naloxone to continue their pattern of pleasure-seeking behaviors, even to their own detriment. However, abuse of opioids is not an act of free will; it is an agonizing compulsion. A person with a substance abuse disorder is compelled to use even when he or she no longer feels pleasure from the act. I volunteer with the Needle Exchange Emergency Distribution to distribute naloxone, clean syringes and other harm reduction supplies to clients in the East Bay area. Tellingly, the article quotes Gov. Paul LePage of Maine saying that “naloxone does not truly save lives; it merely extends them until the next overdose.” Perhaps if Governor LePage met our clients he would see that people with substance abuse disorders are as worthy of compassionate care as anyone with a chronic disease.

CLAUDIA GREENE

Berkeley, Calif.

The writer is pursuing a master’s of public health degree at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health.

To the Editor: Your article discusses two interpretations of the effect of Narcan, the brand name of naloxone. The moral hazard interpretation is that Narcan gives drug users a safety net, allowing some to overdose numerous times in safety. Advocates of Narcan, on the other hand, say it allows people to get into treatment, and there is no evidence that Narcan increases opiate use. Given this uncertainty, I find it difficult to understand how you can write: “There is no question that the nation’s death toll from heroin and prescription opioids would be significantly higher without naloxone.” It is at least logically possible that Narcan will eventually be seen to have been a wholesale mistake.

WILLIAM VAUGHAN Jr.

Chebeague Island, Me.

To the Editor: How could naloxone ever be considered a “cure for an epidemic”? Putting out a fire is not a cure for causes of fires. Sorry, there are no quick solutions to the addiction problem. But there are some steps we should take. Help addicts get services for the addiction and underlying mental health issues. Access to clinics is key. Yet clinics are fewer and fewer and access harder and harder. And, yes, give Narcan to first responders and addicts’ families.

GEORGE SIGEL

Norwood, Mass.

The writer is a psychiatrist.

To the Editor: In an effort to be balanced, the article notes that critics’ opposition to naloxone is based on the premise that it gives drug users a safety net, allowing them to take more risks and seek higher highs, resulting in multiple overdoses. These claims are refuted by studies in New York, San Francisco and here in Connecticut of overdose risks, undertaken before widespread availability of naloxone, in which a strong predictor of an overdose was a previous nonfatal overdose. To date, no evidence has been presented that naloxone availability or use in response to overdoses increases risk-taking or overdose frequency. Instead, there is plenty of evidence that it saves lives and provides those individuals an opportunity to seek treatment. The critics’ disparaging of the lifesaving benefits of naloxone is just another example of the stigmatization of those with the chronic disorder of opioid abuse that brands such individuals as unworthy of efforts to reduce their mortality.

ROBERT HEIMER

New Haven

The writer is a professor at the Yale University School of Public Health.

To the Editor: Your article profiles a 44-year-old woman who has been revived seven times using the lifesaving drug Narcan. At what point does her own personal responsibility make her accountable for her own life? Our society and our health care system need to recognize that we can’t solve everyone’s problems all the time.

FRANK JUSTIN

Providence, R.I.

To the Editor: The same arguments about encouraging more risk taking were made earlier about needle exchange programs to fight H.I.V., delaying their implementation by years. But when New York State stopped heeding the naysayers and did expand access to clean needles, H.I.V. infection rates in drug users, which had stood at 54 percent in 1990, fell to only 3 percent by 2012. Now state health officials call the formerly contentious practice “the one intervention which could be described as the gold standard of H.I.V. prevention.” Let’s not make the same mistake by spreading similarly baseless fears about naloxone.

MAIA SZALAVITZ

New York

The writer is the author of “Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction.”